Atheists on Consciousness

"But defenders of religion like [Kathryn] Lofton and Karen Armstrong and the not-quite-pro-religion-but-getting-there types like Terry Eagleton invariably attack atheists for their lack of charm, style, empathy and another nebulous quality (I think of it as *mysterianism*) which keeps them from fully appreciating the true nature of religion."

Mysterianism, eh?

Only problem is that this 'nebulous quality,' does, in fact, exist. I think that confirms it; these atheists have the mental equivalent to colourblindness. Indeed, why would their from-scratch philosophy have to account for all facets of my experience?

Kids and Kuriosity

"A child's never-ending "whys" aren't meant to exasperate parents, scientists say. Rather, the kiddy queries are genuine attempts at getting at the truth, and tots respond better to some answers than others."

I'm so glad scientists have been able to join us on planet Earth.

Still, I do wonder why parents are exasperated by tot's questions. It seems counter-productive to bar your own child from your knowledge.

The reason questions exasperate people is because it is a form of challenge, like a staring contest. Being challenged for the sake of challenge, especially when you're busy, is exasperating. Small children cannot credibly challenge you, which should, in theory, short-circuit the exasperation mechanism, just like how some people find threats from children, no matter how strident, adorable instead of scary. ("I'm gunna punch you till you fall down!" *Scowl*)

The other reason for exasperation is to avoid acknowledging that the askee doesn't have the answer. I think this is in play, as children are excellent epistemologists and can find logical holes without trying. Humans are born to use the Socratic method on their parents. Parents don't usually respond well.

But even this I find puzzling, as I can't find a reason to not just tell the kid you don't know.

There's no apparent reason question-asking should be annoying, and yet....

"Past research from the early to mid 1900s on child development had suggested that young children were only aware of temporal relationships between two events and couldn't differentiate cause from effect until about 7 or 8 years of age. More recent work has suggested otherwise, that as early as age 3 children get causality."

Never forget that scientists often use their skills to act as stupid as possible. Anyone with kids will immediately think, "They must have not had children!" and be able to cite chapter and verse on their kids getting causality. This is a mistake; they likely did have children. I'd guess the story goes as thus: at home, their personal observations aren't science and thus poor evidence, but their personal observations during a study at work are scientific, and thus good evidence.

(This gets ironic if you read the comments on the other study just linked. I can easily understand the source of the above misperception.)

If I were a journalist I would say it's "frightening" that people like this are in charge of the education system. Calling the status quo frightening seems off. It's certainly depressing, though.

You may note that the science is getting better. Indeed it is, but nobody ever thinks to wait 20-50 years to properly verify a scientific finding before acting on it, despite the massive number of errors, like this one, freely admitted. (Or, you know, find a faster verification method, like logic.)

Incidentally, children as young as zero understand causality, you just don't yet know how to produce a statistically significant study showing this. Causality is innate the human brain - and to many nonhuman brains, for that matter.

"Lacking from such studies are kids' reactions to the information they get to their causal questions. "

A scientist failed at study design? Shocking. You'd almost think that universities don't demand courses on epistemology of their Ph.Ds.

I have no reason to believe the above quote is accurate. It certainly isn't precise. However, if it is right: told you so. You might wonder if the scientists have kids, I wonder if they have brains. They must be using them for something else.

Are the current crop of scientists less determined to be stupid, or are they just playing to my preconceptions better, being closer to my age? Ahh, questions....

"Results showed kids were more than twice as likely to re-ask their question after a non-explanation compared with a real answer. And when they did get an explanation, which was about 37 percent of the time, they were more than four times as likely to reply with a follow-up inquiry as if they had received a non-explanatory response."

First let me re-write that last part. "Kids ask [presumably meaningful] follow up questions to meaningful answers four times as often as to non-answers." I think that's what they're trying to say, but I'm not exactly sure how you ask a follow-up question to a non-answer unless you already know the answer. Given the ignorance on display, I also have to mention kids aren't sophisticated enough to ask questions they already know the answer to, and regardless have far too many questions to which they don't know the answer to bother with the former.

Incidentally, I wonder why parents hate their kids so much. Answer about a third of their questions? Do you want them to be educated, or not?

So, when they were highly curious and receptive, you answered about a third of their questions, and then you wonder why they don't listen to you as a teenager? Sorry bub, it's too late by then, you've already told them they can't rely on you for information.

How do you react if someone who won't answer your queries suddenly turns around and starts trying to dictate how you act?

At least there's no institution that supposedly gets paid based on its ability to teach parents to parent well, so lapses aren't anybody's fault, per se.

"Preliminary results from a separate new study of Frazier's suggest there is such a thing as too much information in a response. "It seems like kids might have an optimal level of detail they're interested in," Frazier said."

Again, I welcome you to planet Earth, journalists'-representation-of-Frazier. On Earth, you see, we pitch answers to children at their level of understanding. What do you do on your own planet?

For an example of the education system (shockingly) getting it right, when teaching addition, we don't start with the Peano axioms. We start with apples, and how if you have two apples in one basket and three in another, you have five total. Similarly, when teaching exponents, we don't do the full definition that allows x⁰ to be obviously one, but instead say, "exponents are repeated multiplication (which is repeated addition)." These statements are not fully correct, but kids understand when we later tell them that the simple things they learned earlier were not complete.

Plus, if they get into the habit of asking their parents and guardians when they're curious, if one notices a hole in their understanding, they'll ask you about it. Which makes me wonder whether odd behaviours like watering plants with coke could be largely prevented by answering questions consistently.

From a comment;

"Maybe when their whys get you riled up it becomes a game, but it's initially to learn."

If you allow your children to get one over on you, they enjoy it, and it starts Pavlovian conditioning. (Small children do not consciously plan these things.) That's why it's important to figure out why the questions are exasperating, and use the knowledge to short-circuit the exasperation.

As a bonus, letting your kids exasperate you can help you do this, because if you watch yourself carefully during the exasperation, you can figure out why it exasperates you. Often, this knowledge alone will alleviate the condition, without actually needing to act on it in any intentional way, albeit I've yet to try it on this particular example, and regardless my experience may or not mirror yours in particulars. At the very least, it will help you to understand when to stop the question flow - and to do it consciously and openly, before you actually become exasperated. If you want to do this, remember to stop a few questions short, because when you say, "That's enough questions for now," they will ask "Why?" and it would be nice if you could give them an answer.

Bayesian 'Reasoning' and Fallacies

That the process of rational reasoning works cannot be justified by reason. The simplest way of looking at why I have to use scare quotes on Bayesian 'reasoning' is that it attempts to justify itself. Why would anyone hold up Bayesian thinking as better than regular thinking? Because they think it's a good idea - they come to the conclusion that Bayesian conclusions are better than their regular conclusions.

Oops.

Bayesian reasoning pre-supposes regular reasoning, and further supposes that it can be reasonably justified, which puts Bayesian reasoning entirely inside regular reasoning. Indeed, Bayes worked out and proved his theorem as a special case with existing tools in an existing framework, just like all mathematical theorems.

While boring to do so, I must disclaim that I do use simple Bayesian kinds of inference, though it seems I've just found the natural Bayesian network in the brain and I use it - I don't ever actually do the Bayes theorem calculation.

If you haven't considered it deeply before, there's an introduction I can recommend, both for showcasing the advantages of Bayes' theorem, and diving with both feet into many of the associated fallacies.


Tribes, Grass, and Rain

As lethal as my single point is, were I Bayesian Bicurious, I would find it unsatisfying.[1] The rest of this section is illustration. The goal is that each point will also be fatal, but be a special case of the overall error.

To start with, Bayes' theorem requires three pieces of information, (as you can see in La Wik) the prior probability of A, the same of B, and the probability of B given A. That scans as utter gibberish to me, so here's an example.

I'm going to use wet grass as evidence of rain. To calculate the probability it has rained if the grass is wet, p(A|B), (as opposed to the probability it's because someone has been washing their car) you need the probability the grass is wet in general, p(B), the probability it has rained in general, p(A), and the probability that the grass gets wet if it has rained, p(B|A). The probability p(B) can also be expressed like this: p(B|A)*p(A) + p(B|~A)*p(~A), which has applications when you don't know p(B) per se but you do know of a lot of possibilities that aren't rain - like car washing - that second part essentially reads, "the probability the grass gets wet from not-rain, times the probability it hasn't rained."

The first problem is that is an awful lot of probabilities to need. The second, more serious problem is that in a controversy, it is easy to the point of inevitability that these probabilities are going to be fudged.

Notice how this computation spirals out of control as more priors are added; p(A|BCDE), isn't too bad, as it's essentially just four of these calculations, but what if, say, C and D are also in dispute, and you need to calculate p(C|XY) as well, and so on? It rapidly becomes a hierarchy of tears, except maybe for a few specialists in the field of A-ology. You, poor schmuck layman, are forced to simply accept the probability calculations of expert A-ologists. (Oh wait, don't we already do this? Err...revolution where now?) To be fully 'rational,' apparently you need a multimillion research budget.

However, the second problem is the pernicious one. Take a moment and realize how ridiculous it is that water falls from the sky. What, do little leprechauns take it up there with buckets? And it just hangs around, ignoring gravity for a while, before it gets into the mood to hang around on the ground again? If it weren't so pervasive, and thus familiar and normalized, rain would be far more mysterious and mystical to stone-age humans than silly little volcanoes. I strongly recommend it - open a door or window next time it rains, and consider how bizarre it is this liquid is just falling willy nilly out of nowhere.

Right, in that frame of mind, let's insert a rain controversy - democracy in the stone age. One clan thinks that when the rain fairies alight on the ground, they leave behind drops on the grass. Another clan thinks that the grass fairies excrete water when it rains, basically to say 'hi,' like they do to greet the morning. These lead to different calculations of p(A|B) - how likely it is that it has rained if the grass is wet. (Through convoluted logic, most of the clans believing one or the other determines who gets to go yak hunting.)

The first clan is certainly less wrong, and they see that the chance of wet grass if it rains is 100%: p(B|A) = 1. The second clan is not about to go down without fighting; observing grass on a hot, dry day, (only slightly missing the actual end of the storm) they notice the grass is dry. They declare that the grass fairies were just unhappy that day, conclusively showing that p(B|A) is actually somewhat less than one. The first clan is outraged, "You were obviously wrong about the rain! There's no way it can rain without the grass getting wet!"

(Technically you're not supposed to ever use probabilities 1 or 0, because they break Bayes' theorem, something I'll detail further down.)

This conflict cannot be resolved by Bayesian reasoning. To work out p(B|A) requires p(A|B) - the very thing that was in dispute to begin with. It's one equation with two unknowns. This is an example of the general problem of assigning probabilities to various pieces of data; the assigned probability unavoidably depends on that non-Bayesian reasoning stuff Bayesians are trying to improve upon.

Note also that neither p(A) nor p(B) can even be properly collected by the clansmen. Their sample size is too small and the demands of hunting and gathering don't help. When our society attempts to probe questions at the limit of our understanding, we run into the same problem - plus, just like the clansmen, it is difficult to even know that our sample is somehow flawed.

In the end, the first clan was mostly from a warm, wet sub region, while the second clan's region had days that were significantly hotter and drier. Their error was not in their logical progression - the first thought that they could tell from the grass if it rained while they slept, the second realized that they couldn't tell for sure - but in how they tried to state their observations. Ultimately, both were right, and both were wrong. And, obviously, I should be the one who gets to go yak hunting.

This is just not compatible with how human reasoning naturally works. Setting aside true random events - for which Bayes' theorem undoubtedly works better than human reasoning - the actual probability of any hypothesis being true is either 0 or 1. (Within certain tolerances - otherwise all hypotheses are false, probability 0, because they're not exactly true.) Bayesians aside, all human reasoning reflects this by backing one horse above all others. Personally I find this handy, as for some reason once I've strongly stated the hypothesis that wins given my available information, I find it much easier to gather and remember related information, often poking holes in my own ideas within days.


Fallacies

Hot Hand Fallacy

So rather than focusing on how it might be true, (ironically, the best way to activate one's confirmation bias) let's turn this fallacy around and see what it might be useful for. (As inspired by a comment.)

How many fair rolls were there in the ancestral environment? Look at how much effort has to go into making fair dice and roulette wheels, and how much effort goes into certifying and inspecting them. Fair gambling is high tech; the stone age would never have seen a truly fair gamble.

However, look at the exact detail of people's beliefs about dice. A die that is giving up wins easily is likely to give up more wins, but each win deplete the die, making further wins less likely. I can't think of a place that kind of belief would have not been useful for a hunter-gatherer. Plants grow in patches. Animals need to find each other to breed. But, every time you actually bag a particularly juicy plant or animal, that's one less left to find.

Even setting that aside, I can bring up the issue of how random distributions actually look:



(from here)

Notice that even if a plant is actually randomly distributed, it will still end up in clumps and veins. There will be hot spots and cold spots. Similarly, if animal activity is linked to weather, the good days and bad days will often occur in clumps. In general, if your hunting or gathering is going well, it is highly rational to expend some extra effort that day, because it will likely be rewarded more efficiently than usual.


The Base Rate Fallacy actually has a point, as these kinds of calculations come up almost exclusively in professional contexts. However...I can get them right, and it's not by trying Bayes' theorem. I instead use the physicist approach. "Probability is defined as the prevalence divided by the total population," I say to myself. Then, using this definition, I simply have to find the relevant numbers, which is straightforward as long as I understand their definitions. In the case linked, it's the number of homosexuals with the disease divided by everyone with the disease, and indeed they also dodge Bayes' theorem by doing the calculation explicitly.

Moreover, when I get the wrong, the reason is because I'm using shortcuts learned during probability classes in public school. I strongly suspect that a physician mis-estimating, say, the odds of a positive mammography to mean cancer, is being mislead by exactly the same training. The cure is not Bayesianism. The cure is to teach math properly.

Conjunction Fallacy

This is a fun one. First, I will forward a hypothesis as to why framing is important. It's because survey subjects will always read things into the question that aren't there, and survey designers not only have no idea what those things are, but are often ignorant that they need to design surveys to account for this. My source for this hypothesis is something I think every philosopher will empathize with; how long it took me to train myself to only read what was there, and not hallucinate all sorts of interesting random things, and subsequently ascribe them to the author.

With this in mind, between the possibilities,

1. The United States will withdraw all troops from Iraq.
2. The United States will withdraw all troops from Iraq and bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.

Why would survey subjects respond that #2 is more likely? I can think of myriad possibilities. Here's one: into option #1, they read, "will withdraw for no reason at all," while into #2 they read, "will withdraw because they want to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities." Both are narratives, but only the second makes any damn sense.

Here's another: in amateur introspectors, the positive feeling of reading a narrative and the positive feeling of high probability are not distinguishable, as they're quite similar.

Oh great Bayesian survey-writer, Accept your Ignorance. You have no idea what your surveys are actually testing, which kind of means more surveys will not help very much.

As below, I like testing things. Let's take these ideas for a spin.

"Is it more likely that Linda is a bank teller, or a bank teller and feminist?"

The average person will read that as,

1. Linda is a bank teller and not a feminist.
2. Linda is a bank teller and a feminist.

Oddly, they ascribe more likelihood to #2.

Why will they read it this way? Because that's how the average person talks. For me, it took quite a bit of mathematical education before I read 'x > 3' as what it means; x can be four, or ten, or a million, or 29 436 502 974, or infinity. Before that point, I read 'x is more than three' as meaning something like eight or so, but probably not beyond ten. As indeed, if you want to talk about things that are in the millions, you need to say, 'x is somewhere over a million.' If it's absolutely necessary to talk about things with a wide range, people say so explicitly, "The variable 'x' can vary widely, sometimes as low as four, but can reach heights vastly exceeding a billion." Further, what non-mathematical object has properties like that? Certainly, that quoted sentence is not one a journalist will ever have cause to use.

Note that you probably just made the exact error I'm detailing. 'have cause to use' does not mean it's the best option, only that it could be accurately used. I'm saying that a journalist will never cover a subject where this sentence will even be useful. (Point of prose: I could say that, but it doesn't seem any less likely to produce the same error, and is drier.)

These ideas spin well. Let's do it again.

"Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequences of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die. Please check the sequence of greens and reds on which you prefer to bet.

1. RGRRR
2. GRGRRR
3. GRRRRR

65% of the subjects chose sequence 2, which is most representative of the die, since the die is mostly green and sequence 2 contains the greatest proportion of green rolls. However, sequence 1 dominates sequence 2, because sequence 1 is strictly included in 2. 2 is 1 preceded by a G; that is, 2 is the conjunction of an initial G with 1. This clears up possible misunderstandings of "probability", since the goal was simply to get the $25."

Um...no it doesn't? Again, I have no idea what the subjects are actually perceiving when they read those options, but it's almost certainly not strictly what's there.

Perhaps they're taking the examples as characteristic of a longer sequence.

Or...it's quite difficult to set aside one's general problem solving habits - which must work, or they'd be rapidly changed - just because some researcher is offering you $25. They may solve the problem this way: "What does the most probable sequence look like?" (In me, this part is involuntary.) They then compare the presented sequences to their ideal sequence. This is much, much faster and more efficient than actually solving the problem at hand. (Employers constantly complain that their employees can't follow directions, incidentally.) The gains from efficiency, in real life, outweigh the costs in efficacy. As a bonus, this interpretation post-dicts their responses.

Or...as amateur introspectors, they're solving it by comparing the greenness feeling of the dice to the greenness feeling of the sequences. For some bizarre reason, this process works better with ratios than with precise numbers. This error is solvable with better math education; mine makes me accept that, oddly, my feelings don't perform math well, and that I have to do the calculation explicitly if I want a precise answer. Err, kind of like all logic.

Moreover, it's not even guaranteed they have an accurate definition of 'probability.' So...are we assuming people are born knowing what 'probability' actually means, and we just later learn the word for it? Are we assuming that, since everyone assumes their own reason is reliable, (as indeed you must) that the default assumption is that each person will assume they can accurately calculate probabilities? Before speculating at the assumptions of the subjects, it's kind of necessary to know the assumptions of the researchers.

While this section is largely made up of just-so stories, these plausible scenarios are not even acknowledged, let alone addressed, by Bayesian proponents.

Ironically, all these fallacies are the result of a Bayesian process. Evolution picks priors by chance, and then the priors are decremented by killing people holding the wrong ones. Literally, your possible ancestors who thought more 'rationally' all got killed. At the very least they got killed in the contest of baby counts - our actual ancestors were just better baby factories. While it may throw up some interesting bugs in a modern environment, are you really comfortable saying that all those people who died were right, and the ones who lived were wrong? So what...does that mean their rightness or wrongness was irrelevant at the time, or have humans, as a species, just been monumentally unlucky?

Bayesian Reasoning Tells Us About Ignorance

The standard thing to do when you have multiple possibilities and no further information is to assign equal possibilities to each one. Say I find my car is flattened, and the possibilities are bigfoot and alien landing site, but as apparently alien ships are foot-shaped, there's no way to tell the difference, and thus they get 50% each. I can sue bigfoot, but the alien landing means we're being invaded, so it matters to get it right.

From this, I can narrow my search - if I find no bigfoot scat, it's probably aliens, and if I find no green glowing alien exhaust, it's probably bigfoot. However, as additional possibilities accumulate - 33% each, 20%, 16%, and so on, the first effect it that it starts telling me more about my own mind than about the singular event that actually happened. The possibilities I come up with start being less about my smushed car and more about what sheet metal reminds me of, or even ideas I just happen to find evocative. (Heh heh.)

What is the probability of dark matter, given our gravitational lensing pictures of colliding galaxies? The converse, the probabily of not-dark-matter, given same, is basically a function of how many other theories you can come up with - as a Bayesian, you have to share out equal probabilities in the case of ignorance, and as you add more possibilities, dark matter starts out as a smaller and smaller piece of the pie, but the relative growth from the pictures is the same...

More importantly, as possibilities multiply, the odds that even one of them are like-correct drops. So it's not really 33-33-33, it's more like there's three possibilities, plus the possibility I have no idea what I'm talking about, so 20-20-20-40. As ignorance grows, the chance you don't even know enough to properly quantify your ignorance grows as well.

Our ignorance of dark matter is probably on par with the ancient Greeks' ignorance of regular matter. It turns out Democritus was less wrong about this, but even he was wrong all over the place. Similarly, the odds that dark matter is neither MACHOs nor WIMPs is pretty high.

So whenever I learn something new, I want to try it out. I'm going to try this one out on extra-terrestrial civilization.

A lot of people want to know if there's other intelligence out there.

Actually, SETI is kind of ironic, as they're so sure ETI is out there, it's hardly worth their time to actually find it - a bit like the first clan was so sure the grass has to be wet after rain.

But, looking around the universe, we don't see evidence of any engineered structures. Now, p(ETI|solar-scale engineering) equals pretty much one, but what about p(ETI|~solar-scale engineering)? Well, it's not like we produce any solar scale structures, but who knows what we'll be capable of the in the future?

So, err, precisely - who knows what we will be capable of a million years in the future? Who knows what we'll find worthwhile a million years in the future?

Going back to the original equation - so what's p(solar engineering) - the general odds of looking at a solar system and finding engineering there? What's p(aliens) - the general odds of looking at a planet and seeing complex life there? We can't even gather these numbers. Drawing in the many-possibilities thread, we don't even know if life has to look all carbony like we do or not. You can run spectrographic analysis on exoplanets that transit the star, and you might find both water vapour and methane in the atmosphere, but it doesn't tell you very much.

If you limit yourself to Bayesian reasoning, these undefineable numbers will remain so forever. Sure, you can define any hypothesis[2] of p(aliens) and p(~aliens) you want, such as 50% each, and revise p(aliens) downward every time you see a planet with no life on it, but you'll run into something of a barrier in knowing how much to revise it downward; calculating p(aliens|lifeless planet) uses p(lifeless planet|aliens) which is zero, and this zero reduces Bayes' theorem to the trivial 0=0. (This is why you're not supposed to use 1 or 0 as probabilities, but it's not like 0.0001 is much better, and indeed even how many zeros to put after the decimal is a judgement call in this case.) Without knowing beforehand the actual p(aliens) and p(~aliens) for a random planet, Bayes' theorem is powerless. In other words, you have to already know the answer to get the right answer.

The summation of this debacle is thus: are you a philosopher? No? Then, if you have a philosophical thing to say, you should Google 'philosophy forums' and pick one, then sign up and post, "Hey there good Mr. and Ms. philosophy dudes, does this make any bloody sense at all?" They'll generally reply, "No! And get off my lawn!" In addition, they'll be happy to tell you what you should be doing instead, as vetted by thousands of years of the smartest people on the planet. (On many issues, philosophy hasn't advanced beyond Aristotle because he got it right.) If that doesn't work, I understand professors are more than happy to answer the curiosity of the public - find one's email and email them. (At least, it works for me. If it doesn't for you, try a second philosopher.) I don't run around saying I know statistics better than you, so how about you do me the honour of not pretending you know philosophy better than I do?

Tangents:

[1] Actual Bayesians, I would guess, have roughly zero percent chance of being persuaded, p(open-mind-on-this-issue|Bayesian) -> 0.

[2] Hypotheses come, surprisingly enough, from outside Bayesian reasoning, even according to Bayesians. How one comes up with a good hypothesis is not addressed.

As an epistemologist, I almost always should avoid probability. That particular problem is a problem for ontologists.

'States' of Matter

The scare quotes are there because the way to objectively define states of matter is by a discontinuity on a particular graph, and this discontinuity shows that there are dozens if not hundreds of states of matter. (Update: when someone says 'fourth' or 'fifth' state of matter found, you should laugh at them.)

Regardless, sand dynamics are actually quite pretty.

The problem the physicists are having is that they don't truly understand what a states of matter are - if I asked one "What is a 'liquid?'" they wouldn't have an answer that really defines a liquid. If they did, they could simply look at the sand dynamic equations and say, "Ah, this part looks like a liquid, and this part looks more like a solid," or see edge cases where some solid properties and some liquid properties are present simultaneously. Moreover, defining this thing would likely clarify what, exactly, a 'state' of matter actually is.

Do you also think that the way the falling sand grains bead up looks awfully similar to the way stars bead up together?

AI Found a Blog, Was Disappointed, But In an Interesting Way

I ran across a history blog ("Muhlberger's Early History") and I thought I should have a crack at evaluating it, as it would be nice to have a history source that isn't Mencius Moldbug.

It's an official university blog. Strike one; the primary goal of the blog is institutional brownie points, not truth. On the Obama prize, Muhlberger links approvingly to Daily Kos. Strike two; although everyone makes mistakes.

Then I ran across this:

"If you want to slam academia... ...you don't need to go after advanced literary theory. In fact there are juicier and more important targets."

"Well, I promised myself I'd finish this before the sequel appeared in the shops, and the conclusion has been made, shall we say, somewhat easier by the fact that the burden of my conclusion - that there is something terribly, horribly wrong with the state of modern economics - has become somewhat of an open door to push against."

""When future generations ask the economics profession 'What were you doing while the great bubble built up ahead of the Second Great Depression?', and we have to reply 'Lots and lots of quirky little working papers about sumo wrestling and speed-dating', it is going to be really, really, fucking embarrassing""

Strike three was a critical. I was hoping for a...slightly...more substantial criticism. Even if this one is true, I would just respond, "What, that's it? That's your slamming of 'academia?'"

I'll accept the Democratic axiom for the moment. Further, I'll accept that scientists should determine public policy. Even given this, there's a serious mismatch between the conclusions of economics and policy. (And it seems slamming academia is getting trendy.) However, the above pretty clearly isn't it.

To clearly see why I say so, compare this paper to the above:

"Economists have been complaining about anti-market, anti-foreign, make-work, and pessimistic biases for centuries."

"At the government agency where I have worked and where agency lawyers and agency microeconomists interact with each other . . . the lawyers are often exasperated, not only by the frequency with which agency economists attack their proposals but also by the unanimity among the agency economists in their opposition. The lawyers tend to (incorrectly) attribute this opposition to failure to hire “a broad enough spectrum” of economists, and to beg the economists, if they can’t support the lawyers’ proposals, at least to give them “the best economic arguments” in favor of them. . . . The economists’ answer is typically something like, “There are no good economic arguments for your proposal.”"

I can come up with at least four possible reasons why economics papers are focusing on niche topics. The first is that they're tired of being ignored, and are focusing on topics which aren't farts in the wind. Second is that they already unanimously agree on all the serious topics, have already weighed in, are spending time on other things. Third, the layman has no idea how relevant these topics are (speed dating) as models for fundamental economic theories. Finally, Daniel Davies actually has no idea what economics papers are on, (he admits to not reading The Economist, presumably he can admit to ignorance of other things as well) and is therefore misrepresenting the field.

Naturally, none of these are addressed by Davies. The simplistic thought on display here is a typical feature of ignorance, often indulged in by smart people analyzing anything that isn't in their actual field of study. (Which is troubling, as his whole blog appears to be about economics.) I'm probably committing this exact error right now to some degree, although the difference is that I'm eager to rectify my ignorance.

As a bonus, now I know I'm right for skipping Freakonomics. ("The basic problem with the Freakonomics era was that the profession abandoned the study of production, consumption and exchange." If that's what Freakonomics is, say no more, I'll be over here...)


Tangents:

Notably the blog seems very light on actual history, although the pictures are quite nice. On the front page as of now, there are only two posts about actual early history, on the same topic, and both are teasers for other websites.

If you really want to study what's wrong in the state of Denmark, the first step is to divide economics into microeconomics and macroeconomics. The second is to realize that the Austrian school is legitimate, and you must deal with it, pro or con, if you want to be a real thinker on economics. Just from this you have a 2x2 matrix, 11, 10, 01, 00, and you need to figure out which one is true. The full matix of questions you need to answer is much bigger, of course, but this is a good start.

I could add tone/attitude to my little comparison; you may want to do so yourself.

Turns out Davids writes for Crooked Timber. Ouch, that must suck.

I should clarify that I don't have much issue with Daily Kos' ideas, however the attitude and general epistemological ability of the place are in the pits somewhere. I've seen the ideas put forward politely and coherently elsewhere, places where I can respectfully disagree (and yes I disagree) without being labelled a heretic and exiled. If you want to make Daily Kos' points, you should find those places and link to them instead, unless you want brownie points instead of debate. Daily Kos is awesome for brownie points.

Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

Ah, a professional saying their profession is the most noble. But when a philosopher says it, it's reliable. Right? Right?

Insert laughter here...

However, philosophy is the best trade for the dilettante. If you want to walk into any workplace and immediately have something worthwhile to say, first learn philosophy. Then you'll know better than to try it.

Democratic Essence - Followup

As a followup. Also contain power from first principles.

I ask myself; what is the president of America doing that's useful? What could he be doing? I have one interesting answer, but setting that aside...

For the most part,* he's just a figurehead. I found a blog once which, among other useful things, discussed all the productive things G.W. Bush tried to do. They were all shot down, of course, president or no president. Most republican presidents are like this, while the democratic presidents know better than to try anything. (The dem faction has workarounds anyway.) So they're not actually doing anything.

*(Let's say 70-80%)

But, constructing an imaginary polity where da Prez actually had power, what could they be doing? It turns out this requires a rather large perturbation - it's not like the president can just draft a law and sign it in. But, even going through that, it looks like the best thing the president could do would be to leave well enough alone. The existing over-regulation has kind of taken on a life of its own and the economy has grown over it like a mold. Trying to fix it now is just likely to make a mess.

And, aside from the economy's inherent structural flaws, such as factional reserve, which can't be fixed by a president anyway, it works pretty well. It's not like it needs a whole lot of messing with.

So, answer: the president should basically be sitting on their thumbs. (Again, say 70-80%.)

That figurehead position is exactly what the president should be, and very likely where the head of any country with a functioning high-tech economy would be. Ultimately the function of a modern head of state is just a coordination point - because discipline beats numbers every time, to the point where it hardly matters what everyone is coordinating on.

Which makes the obsession with who gets to fill that spot ironic. King, priest, dictator, elected official, CEO...it doesn't matter, because your options are; sit on your thumbs, or make things worse. (Hello, North Korea!) And while military culling has been suppressed recently, every real war is a pissing contest - the one with the bigger economy wins. For instance, imagine South Korea's backers decided tomorrow to let South Korea mobilize and reunite the peninsula - what, exactly, is Kim Jong Il supposed to do about it? Throw pitchforks at their jets? Modulo some nukes, here, of course...but I suspect the necessary artful diplomacy would have already neutralized even those. And without his own backers, KJ would never have gotten nukes in the first place.

To try to check this answer, I'm going to look at power from first principles.

A person has power when they can influence the actions of another. Hierarchies start to form economically, with some kind of contract exchanging benefits for servitude of some scope.
Consider a stone age tribe, with some kind of primitive economy, such as barter or simply communism. Also assume that for some reason, there's an opening for tribal elder.

Someone who knows where the mammoths roam exchanges his knowledge for extra pointy things from the spear-knapper and more money from the cockleshell guy. They all go out and down a mammoth, and the three enjoy delicious mammoth steak; everyone benefits. Eventually, a couple more of the tribe crave meaty mammoth, and trade extra clothes and roots.
Eventually, though, the everyone knows where the mammoths roam, because they've been on so many hunts; mammoth-guy isn't really contributing anymore. So, let's say at the next generation, the son of spear-knapper realizes that he really doesn't need the son of mammoth-guy. He tries to get son of shell-guy to break with him so they can go mammoth hunting with the dead weight of mammoth-guy, and thus the labour can get a 'fairer' share of the fruits.

It doesn't work. Shell-guy is all like, "But if I go with you, I'll lose the extra clothes and roots." The same goes for the others; they would lose out on shells and clothes, and roots and shells. Individually, each has a positive motive to stay in the agreement, and mammoth-guy can use his existing agreement-wealth against any dissenter. In the end, spear-guy probably has to give up more spear points just to keep access to the in-group.

Yes, it does seem that if the children of everyone but mammoth-guy all stand up together and cast off mammoth-guy, the only real downside is that if mammoth-guy wasn't retarded, he will have stockpiled a bunch of points and shells, and so they will temporarily lose a store of capital. But even with four people, the necessary coordination is nontrivial, not to mention that overturning the existing agreement means that all have an opportunity and motive to squabble for advantage in the new agreement.

With thousands of people, it effectively becomes impossible. Historical revolutions originate from competing leaders, not anything resembling class consciousness.

So, power from first principles; it can form noncoercively, but once formed, its main advantages are those of a coordination point - it preempts conflict and imparts coordination - while breaking it reopens the conflict and requires even more coordination. It has both a positive and negative feedback promoting stability.

Moreover, a good leader can use their economic clout to channel their followers to more productive pursuits. If son of mammoth-guy is canny, he will specialize in being more of a merchant; while he still goes on hunts, his main pursuit is trading his stockpiled wealth for positive-sum labours by his followers. Given enough time, son of mammoth guy will be able to buy the whole tribe, and, most likely, even the tribe next door.

(This probably never happened - humans prefer to build up economies to make armies, and then simply conquer the next tribe over. All the kingdoms and nations we are familiar with were united by conquest; as a result, it's absurd to be against modern conquest.)

The president, no matter who they are, is pretty much in the same boat - they can't truly offer anything much of value as a person, and are instead interchangeable. However, the existence of -some- president is of great value. And while it is true that being president is pretty swank, providing incentive for people to take the job, in a modern economy there's lots of opportunity for nearly equally swank jobs elsewhere.

And what about my point that, even more so than the tribal merchant-prince-elder, they should be sitting on their thumbs?
Beyond some critical point of wealth, mammoth-dude realizes that instead of waiting for spear-dude to rebel, he could simply pay off one faction to coerce even more extra payments from another. Ultimately this is shooting himself in the foot - the more negative sum games he plays, the more likely the next tribe over will build a better economy and simply trash his tribe one day. However, just like it's difficult for individual subjects to see that their long-term interest is probably served better by not following mammoth-dude, it is almost impossible (judging from history) for mammoth-dude to see past his own short term gain.

This is basically the only kind of game a president can play - take one faction (for example, the courts) and use it against another. They can't even merchant-prince the way mammoth-dude can, because there are literally thousands of people who know thousands more about how to make a buck, and they're already doing it.

Aside from the odd exception, there is only one thing a president need concern themselves with; making sure they aren't toppled, thus destroying the figurehead bonus.